The Environmental Protection Agency ruled greenhouse gasses to be pollutants, international leaders are meeting on climate change in Copenhagen, and Lehigh Valley Congressman Charlie Dent has joined a few dozen colleagues in urging an investigation into "climategate."

Dent and his cosigners have written a letter to the inspector generals of the the EPA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Departments of Energy, Commerce and Interior urging them to look into "troubling" email exchanges among climate change scientists made public in recent weeks.

In a really tiny nutshell: the emails have given global warming skeptics plenty of ammunition and have sparked renewed debate over the causes and impact of rising temperatures.

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Very interesting take from across the pond:

Barack Obama’s use of the EPA to pressurise the Senate to pass his climate change ... shows his dictatorial mentality. He wants to override Congress, which is hostile to his climate gobbledegook because it is representative of the American electorate, and sideline the nation’s elected Senators by ruling by decree, courtesy of the EPA. This is a coup d’état.

Fortunately, the world’s leading democracy, which he is trying to subvert, has guarantees of liberty so deeply embedded in its Constitution that US citizens are well placed to fight back.

In the first place, regulation can be challenged in a way that laws cannot. So the EPA’s proposed ruling on so-called “Greenhouse Gases” can be opposed extensively with litigation, to the point that the ruling might not yet be in force when Obama demits office. In the second place, the EPA is funded by Congress. So, if the Agency is being used to bypass or neuter Congress, why should legislators not play hardball and retaliate by cutting off its funding?